I don't trust the product support - how does your Roadmate act? HUGE POST

Excuse the long post -- this may include ranting. So I didn't see the Amazon review that said not to buy the Roadmate 5265T-LMB :(( It's a manufacturer refurbished unit - less expensive and some have suggested they get tested more than any that just come out of the factory. I liked the idea of lifetime updates especially since the whole reason I was buying a GPS was I got spoiled by driving Dad's car while I was taking care of him for an extended period. But his Hyundai's maps were soooo out of date that you couldn't depend on the POI for anything built in the last 4 years and they wanted $$$ for the updates.

Out of the box, it worked pretty well although it sent me on a couple of wild goose chases but I was familar enough with the area to realize it pretty fast. It was getting close to the time I was going to making the 1200 mi. drive home, so I thought I'd better get this thing registered and updated! So I plug the GPS into the laptop and the unit says it's connected and silly me I am expecting some auto install - not so! This was April 27 and I go to Magellan's site and register and start a chat with Yvette, "download Content Manager". Next day (the 28th) I do that and Content Manager registers it and says there are updates available. I cancel out of it because I didn't have a full charge on the unit. Then on the 29th, I hook it back up and then there were no longer any updates WTH! I may have tried rebooting and still no luck. I put it aside for a few days and it seems to me that the next reasonable thing to do is uninstall and reinstall the software. Lo and behold, now Content Manager gives me a screen showing the model and serial number and so on but still no updates. Well, I'm just going to have to make this drive with my fingers crossed.

Last week, I contact Yvette again and cannot convince her that my system did not update properly. To listen to Magellan, the unit had the correct version number (58.01) so all must be good. Never mind that they now have the correct address for one of the wild goose chases (Dad's local Home Depot) and I still have some goofy address many miles away so it seems obvious to me that the Point of Interest database is hosed. I thought that was good enough evidence that there was an issue. (She has me key in the correct address and thought I should be happy - well heck I never said that it couldn't get me some place if I already had the address). I felt this as a total breakdown in logical communication (I think I had been on the phone for over 30 minutes already) and asked to have the call escalated. On hold for 5 minutes waiting for the supervisor and then comes back and tells me her supervisor says everything is fine because the GPS says it has map 58.01. So I have to insist that if she couldn't see my logic as to why I thought something was wrong and she couldn't offer a plausible explanation for the differences in databases, then how can I expect her to have explained the history and my logic to her supervisor. Let me talk to the boss or the technical people. On hold for another 5 minutes and then what happens but we were disconnected. You know how they ask for a callback number in case that happens -- nobody calls me -- surprise, surprise.

Someplace along the way, she said that I should use the on-line update and sent me an email on how to do that. I just did that and in addition to getting a driver error, I did get the new software loaded to find that the address sync'ing function has been taken away for my model. Nice map of southern CA that I couldn't get to change. Looks like maybe I was supposed to be able to get directions a la "google map" or "mapquest" from the application but not so much. Interestingly it gave detailed version info on the individual files that are being used.

Now for any of you who are still with me, here are some of my concerns and I expect some of the are "that's just the way it is":

- Point of interest locations - prior to selecting one, distances as the crow files, and so it underestimates the distance and will frequently select the wrong one as the nearest.- I am missing POIs galore. Not new places either. I'm sitting in the parking lot of the at least 10 year old Lowe's and I can type it w/ or w/o the apostrophe and I get Clowes Auditorium, and this one took a minute to figure out - Buffalo Wild Wings. The other night I just started typing in places to see if it would find them. Fedex - didn't find the 4 offices around Indianapolis but found two - 30 and 50 miles away. But it did find their local credit union office. UPS - not the closest office but one further away and the Saddle Up Saloon. None of the veterinarians nearby either by name or as a group. Emergency services - didn't find half of the local immediate care centers. Emergency Automotive Services? It comes up with a battery manufacturing company, auto glass repair, manufacturer of medical testing devices, body shop (knock on wood, I won't need them), Enterprise Rent a Care - well in an emergency ... , car stereo sales and so on until it finds a real repair place and still only had to travel 1.2 miles. Four Men's Warehouses and none are listed. And so on and so on. (It was suggested that because I did the update while I was in Florida that would cause Indiana points to be missing.)- So I start hacking around and see that the map files on the unit have names indicating they are version 58.01 and are dated 4/27 BEFORE I had even installed Content Manager. The mapversion.ini lists 12 files including prior versions, so I am wondering if the software is supposed look up data in both the old POI and the new POI files but in the update the old files got deleted. My Map folder has 1.57 gb in 8 files. Does that line up with what you folks have?- I read someone suggesting defragging their map folder to improve performance. Could see where that could impact speed if it were reading many files simultaneously but I don't see that could resurrect missing data. And I can't complain about the speed - I think it does a nice job of responding to if I ignore it's directions. Anyone else think it would be worth the effort?- Log files (:\\dumpfiles.roundrobin) have entry "Apptracker can't found (sic) windprocthread for" . . . 7 different files. That message has been present since day one during the refurbishing so I assume they are informational only. If anyone's shlog.txt doesn't have those "problems" listed please let me know. - Trip mileage and cumulative mileage don't work.- Was adding an address and when going to categorize it, there were no categories listed. :\\USR\AbCategoryList.txt is 0 kb.- :\\USR\backup is an empty folder. I can use the Content Manager to back up the address book but I wonder if there is supposed to be something/someway to backup other files.- I wish it had a clock on screen or else told me that my ETA was in x minutes. Maybe there's a setting I just havent' found yet.- And then of course I have to find a mount that will work in my car - but that would be an issue no matter what GPS I had chosen.

It would be really wonderful if you or someone at MiTac/Magellan had a solution to the missing POIs and then all the rest of issues would be no big deal- it's just that taken all together, I am really disappointed. And all this without even having tried hooking up the bluetooth. Enough for now, I think I'll go check to see if I'll be able to drive to and or around Puerto Rico!

Comments

Well if your main concern is POIs and the lack of them or the correct location of them then your probably out of luck no matter whether Magellan gets your other issues resolved or not. I've owned and/or used about 10 automotive GPS units since 2005 and overall the built in POI database on all of them are pretty weak. I've never owned a Magellan unit but have used one in a rental car once and never noticed that it was any worse than any of my Garmin or TomTom units as far as accuracy of POI data is concerned. It's just the way it is.

The mapping companies collect the POI data from a variety of sources and since they are dealing with business locations of one sort or the other they are really hard to keep up to date. First they are at the mercy of the supplying company for accuracy and then these businesses move, go out of business, etc on an almost daily basis so it is a never ending battle.

On the plus site however, particularly here in North America, there is a very large dedicated group of people that are committed to building well researched POI files for almost any company or purpose you could think off. These files are maintained regularly and are probably much more up to date and accurate than any you will find in the built in POI data on an automotive GPS. These files can be found at a website called POI-factory.com and for the most part are free. The site is centered more on Garmin and TomTom files but most have an option to load POI data in Rand McNally format which I think will work on your Magellan This is probably your best bet for having accurate POI locations on your device.

Thank you t923347 that is a very interesting site although it looks like I could spend all my waking hours playing with all those databases. It may be simpler than it appears. My problem with the POI on the Magellan doesn't have anything to do with keeping up to date - that I would understand - all of the places it couldn't find were old.

I did see another post where defragging helped their POIs. I may give that a go.

My problem with the POI on the Magellan doesn't have anything to do with keeping up to date - that I would understand - all of the places it couldn't find were old. .

Age of the location isn't a factor in whether a POI is accurate or exists in the built in map data of Garmin, TomTom, or Magellan GPS units. There are countless examples of a given business location not being present in any of the POI databases from all these GPS manufacturers even though the place has been open for years in the same location.. I'm afraid if this is an issue for you then the best you can do is to try a GPS from another company to see it they are any better than what Magellan offers but really it's just the way it is and we have lived with it for years.

Also, I know that defragging a Garmin GPS has caused a number of issues with the file systems becoming corrupted on these devices. I can't think of any reason why doing a defrag of a Magellan's internal storage would help a POI issue. IMHO the last thing you'd want to do is to defrag your GPS in hopes that a missing POI will magically appear, but it's your money.

I don't think defragging has any relevance to a device that uses flash storage. Defragging is used on hard disks, so that data can be accessed in consecutive sectors on a track as the disk spins as opposed to having to move the head to another track, which takes longer. Your Magellan uses solid state storage with no moving parts.

I think, understandably, you are missing some info about the POI feature and the underlying road map. The map of the road network is designed to be inclusive of the stated coverage area. Within that coverage area it is the intention that all roads should be there and are updated.

POIs are much different. There was a time when GPS companies would list how many POIs (like 500,000, 2 million, etc) were put into the GPS and different models had different amounts of POIs. Some only had 500,000 while others might have 7 million. Part of the reason for this was the expense of flash memory a number of years ago. With a GPS that had only 1GB or so of memory there wasn't much room for a big POI database.

While it is easy to assume otherwise, GPS companies didn't market that the POI database was as complete as the road network. They would try to prioritize which POIs they would include, but most businesses were not included.

Today, given smartphones accessing the cloud and inexpensive memory those limitations are no longer there, but the POI databases themselves are still not complete. Even the mapping companies (not the GPS companies who purchase/license the maps) don't have complete databases of POIs and still rely on yet other companies to license the data from.

Accurate, up to date information about POIs is incredibly difficult to achieve. I almost never use a GPS or GPS app to find the address of a business-- I'll go to the website of the business first as I just don't trust any of the POI databases or even websites like Yelp, Foursquare, Google Local, etc.

Of course I find plenty of places on Yelp, Google Earth and Google Maps that are misplaced or closed down years ago. So none are perfect. You just have to do some research ahead of time when you can and hope for the best when you depend on a last minute look up.